How did you get into Scientology?

I have decided to start a new feature here: “How did you get into Scientology?”

I will start out with my own story and collect up an add stories of friends and colleagues as well.

So, to begin, here’s mine:

In 1967, I was pretty smug about my life after college, marriage and our first kid. I had graduated an excellent university with a double major while working three part-time jobs. I was the golden boy of the business club I joined, and was earning decent money selling and writing ads for a radio network.

So when a buddy at the station told me Scientology could improve my communication skills, I wasn’t impressed. But he made me promise to stop by to talk with the people who ran a small Scientology and Dianetics center nearby. Once I had promised, I had to go.

In all cold honesty, I didn’t like the first Scientology book I read. I wanted complex answers, bigger words—not these simple ideas any eighth-grader could understand!

Then I read Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science by L. Ron Hubbard. It was a life-changer that I stayed up late to finish. It MADE SENSE of so many things never answered in my college philosophy and psych classes. Evolution of a Science progressed as a tentative, step-by-step, investigative exploration:

“Maybe this works…”

“Nope. Inadequate benefit to the troubled person. Keep looking.”

“Try this. Yes, this works! People get better. Proceed this direction. It gets results.”

It was an honest narrative of how early research always works. I was encouraged that it wasn’t just someone’s ideas. The methods had been perfected on men and women who reliably got better or got over what was troubling them.

Strangely, when I went back to read the first book I had tried a few years later, its wisdom cut through  the “intellectual complexities” I had self-importantly layered upon myself. Simpler isn’t always better, but if you can dodge around your ego and see simple truth when it’s presented, as it is in that book—Scientology: A New Slant on Life—that is far better than ignorance, bad directions, or intellectual paralysis.